By Patrick Goodenough
(CNSNews.com) - With a venue and date set for a United Nations conference on racism, organizations hoping to avoid a repeat of the problems that plagued the 2001 gathering are going to have to be "very aggressive to see that Israel and her Zionist supporters around the world are not demonized," a leading Jewish human rights groups said Wednesday.
The U.N. announced this week that the conference will be held in Geneva over five days next April.
The gathering is meant to review progress made in the battle against racism and xenophobia since the World Conference Against Racism, held in Durban, South Africa in 2001.
The Durban U.N. meeting and a parallel non-governmental organization (NGO) forum were characterized by repeated attacks on Israel, including accusations of racism and apartheid-like policies. The United States and Israel withdrew their delegations in protest, and some of the language targeting Israel in the conference draft documents was subsequently changed.
Plans for a review conference -- dubbed "Durban II" by critics, although it won't be held in the South African port city this time round -- have raised fears that Israel once again will find itself in the dock.
Canada and Israel earlier this year announced they would boycott the conference, and the U.S. and Britain have indicated that they will not take part if the preparatory process suggests that the upcoming conference will repeat controversial elements of the 2001 event.
The U.S. also is not taking part in the preparatory sessions, and last December it voted against the overall U.N. budget resolution in part because of its opposition to the inclusion of funding for Durban II.
The groundwork for the conference is being laid by a U.N. preparatory committee (PrepCom) bureau, comprising representatives of 20 countries including Iran, Cuba and Pakistan, and chaired by Libya. The process is taking place under the aegis of the U.N.'s Human Rights Council (HRC), which has itself drawn fire for what critics say is a disproportionate focus on Israel at the behest of Islamic states.
The involvement of countries like Libya and Iran, and the HRC's supervisory role, have contributed to the concerns that have led some government to announce or consider a boycott.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of Simon Wiesenthal Center, was at the Durban conference and vividly recalls the atmosphere that tarnished the gathering and associated NGO forum.
He said Wednesday the event "produced the most anti-Semitic document since the end of World War II."
"All the difficulties that we're dealing with -- on the campuses, in the international community, even among some churches in terms of labeling Israel an apartheid state --that's a script that was ... concretized in Durban I."
Cooper said that out of some 3,900 NGOs present in Durban, only half a dozen of them, "when it counted -- in real time, not a week or two or a month later -- spoke out against what was taking place." Others "stood on the sidelines and did nothing."
Jewish organizations now have their hands full to see "that we won't have the same kind of environment, so far as NGOs are concerned, at Durban II."
The Wiesenthal Center has been in touch with 45 key NGOs, and has heard back from some high-profile organizations, Cooper said. "I'm hopeful that we won't see that kind of either complicit behavior or apathetic attitude this time around."
Ninety-five NGOs from around the world have signed a declaration expressing regret about aspects of Durban I and setting out "core principles" for U.N. member-states and NGOs ahead of the 2009 conference.
Among other things, they pledged to prevent a repeat of incitement of hatred against a group "in the guise of criticism of a particular government."
'Stacked deck'
Cooper said that while it remained to be seen "what role the NGOs will play at Durban II," an anti-Israel attitude in the international community was, if anything, "even more aggressive" now than it was in 2001.
"With some of the countries that are in the driver's seat [of the planning process] -- countries like Libya and Iran -- the deck is certainly stacked against us if you just look at it in terms of who the players are," he said.
"When the Human Rights Council is given the role of overseeing the process, that is a terrible signal, just by virtue of what the council has done since it's come into existence. It's been basically used ... to beat up on Israel, and there's no reason to believe that that is going to change in any substantial way."
At the same time, the pressure coming from other governments was welcome.
"Canada is boycotting, others have indicated they are watching the process carefully to see whether or not they should bother showing up," he said. "There is some pressure. We'd like to see a lot more pressure on the part of the United States and European countries."
Financial pressure also was important, Cooper added.
"[Those] who fund the U.N. agencies are signaling the Arab and Muslim nations that they better watch their behavior, because they could end up pulling the financial rug out from under them."
The decision to hold the conference in Geneva was taken at a closed-door PrepCom meeting in the Swiss city on Monday, following months of differences over the venue.
European nations pushed for the conference to be held in Geneva or another U.N. city, in the hopes that doing so would make a repeat of the Durban scenes less likely.
The U.N. said in a statement Tuesday that Geneva had been settled on. The meeting had also agreed on issues including which NGOs to accredit and a working group had begun to draft a final document for the Apr. 20-24 conference.
Regional preparatory meetings will be held in the coming months in Brazil and Nigeria.
Anne Bayefsky, editor of the Hudson Institute's Eye on the U.N. project, noted that the dates chosen for the conference include the day on which the Holocaust is commemorated.
"Jews all over the world will be remembering the six million murdered in the worst instance of racism and xenophobia in human history," she said in a statement.
"At the same time, the United Nations will be discussing whether the Jewish state, created in the wake of the Holocaust and standing as a bulwark to ensure it is never repeated, should be demonized as the worst practitioner of racism and xenophobia among nations today."
Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah) has since the 1950s been marked on the 27th day of Nisan on the Jewish lunar calendar, which in 2009 falls on April 21.
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